In reply to Matthew Dessem.

Possibly. I've never read Tolstoy and as far as I'm aware don't have any Zulu blood, so the context could be completely different. I do happen to think context shouldn't be dismissed on the grounds that "real art is timeless," since I do insist that art is about communication, and relevance is a huge part of communication. Even if, say, Anna Karennina really does have more complex things to say about the human condition than say, Small Gods, the Discworld book is more likely to resonate with me since I'm more tuned to comedy fantasy worlds than 19th century Russia.

Undoubtedly there's some notion of an objective level of "literary value" in a book — several of the Discworld books, for instance, are simply parodies — so I'm not at all suggesting that all literary works are interchangeably complex and valuable. I'm saying that it's more of a Schrodinger's Cat situation: my interpretation of the work has the potential to kill any complex ideas contained inside. The division between high art and low art that I'm talking about is how far you go to make those ideas accessible: is it enough simply to translate it from Russian to English, or do you have to add robots?

I'm not saying that "high art" and "low art" are always interchangeable, I'm saying that the distinction is unnecessarily dismissive and limiting of "low art." I read The Unvanquished by William Faulkner around the same time that I read Watership Down by Richard Adams. (Not exactly "low art," but often described as a "children's book.") I can't remember a damn thing about The Unvanquished except it had something to do with the Civil War. But I can still remember tons of details about Watership Down.

Now, I can remember tons of details from The Far Side comics that I read at the same time, too, but that doesn't mean they're great literature. But Watership Down, despite being just a "children's book," had ideas about religion, belief, suffering, and inevitability that stuck with me and have subtly altered how I've thought about things in the almost 30 years since I read it. So which one is more valuable?